However, I am very excited to see the thaw. This was my first winter in a place where the lakes and rivers freeze (upstate NY) during the winter, and it makes me really happy now to see WATER on my drive in to work instead of ice.

I was so excited about spring I planted the onion that had sprouted on my kitchen table in my side yard. It was green and happy on my kitchen table, but I guess it's still not quite spring yet. It's yellow and sad outside my window.

My husband wondered if we're culpable for the onion's death. I reminded him that if I hadn't decided to let the little green shoots grow, we would have just eaten it.

Seems like a number of people are burned out on the idea of a "soulmate" and, indeed, it's just an idea. Thinking you're "missing out" (because you're not good enough, persistent enough, spiritually tuned-in enough) has caused a lot of needless suffering. There is an unfortunate subtle intimation that if you don't "find" one, you're a ... See Moreloser, or missing out on life's most important aspect. Yes, it's marvelous that some people find each other and click, romp, do great things together. It's luck or fate or whatever. Because everything changes and ends, it's not a prerequisite for an extraordinarily creative and love-filled life. I had a best friend for 4 years in junior/senior high and we were inseparable and had the best times together and grew intellectually and emotionally. Then she moved away and we grew apart and separately. Most people aren't fortunate enough to ever have that experience! Not to diminish one iota the joy of moving through a part of life with the seemingly "perfect" mate, I think it's more important to recognize and cleave to that soulmate within, cultivating the conversation with our "higher self", seeing the joy of perfect Reality and letting Love express itself through and around us.

I do this comic riff my friends find hilarious, at least they do laugh, lampooning a Playboy centerfold profile. I strike poses using a chair for a prop, provocative at first, then risqué, then flat out rude, then ludicrously improbable, all the while vocally completing the profile with erudite interests and pursuits in an innocent high-pitched voice; pre-med student, favorite movies all obscure niche foreign films, books all classics and masters-level philosophy, etc. And now Rielle Hunter totally upstages my whole schtick with her spread in GQ and her interview. That does it! I quit.

I see that the thaw has released the frigid, slimy, barnacle-covered twat named Maxine Weiss from her icy prison 'neath the lake. I hear she spent the winter dead and dreaming of her personal Xenu Ann Althouse.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers "deem" the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic -- known as a "self-executing rule" or a "deem and pass" -- has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.